History of the World

Patrick Brennan from the land down under offers this intriguing variant for this Avalon Hill classic.

History of the World is pretty much a recognized Avalon Hill classic. Still, the game has its detractors and its problems.

Patrick Brennan was concerned that the player who had the lowest strength didn’t necessarily have a reasonable chance of selecting a decent nation each round. So, he utilized the card passing method found in Bruno Faidutti’s Ohne Furcht und Adel (and earlier in Verrater) and incorporated it into the game. Here is his variant.

Each round, one civilization card (nation) is discarded at random. Then, deal one civilization card face-down to the table. The player with the least strength points (tie breaker is least Victory Points, then last in the turn order from the previous round) takes the remaining civilization cards and chooses one. He then passes the remaining cards to the player who has the next least accumulated strength, who then selects a card of his choice. This process is completed until the final player receives one card, whereupon he can choose between this card and the card which was dealt face down to the table (which he can look at before deciding).

The idea of this variant is to ‘equalize’ the strength points as much as possible and give the players who have the least accumulated strength points to date a better chance at receiving a more powerful nation to lead.